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The Spanish Earth

Hardly had Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens walked down the
gangplank of the ship that brought him to America in
February, 1936, than he found himself immersed in a
fast-breaking film project. In July, 1936, the five-month-old
elected Republican government of Spain was attacked by rebel
right-wing generals soon to be led by Francisco Franco. Thus
began the bloody, divisive Spanish Civil War that raged until
1939, when Franco's professional soldiers finally overcame
democracy's amateurs and the foreign volunteers that rushed
to their aid, including, from America, the Lincoln
Brigade.

In an effort to generate support for the Loyalists, as the
Republican side was known, the American Popular Front, whose
ranks were swelled by artists of anti-fascist conviction,
launched a film project to propagandize for the Republican
cause. Ivens, a militant Communist who had made films in the
Soviet Union and the depressed Belgian mining area known as
the Borinage, was to direct it. The Republican sympathizers'
efforts first resulted in a film called Spain in
Flames. Consisting of footage from various sources, with
most of the newsreel material pro-Franco, augmented by Soviet
footage of the front lines, it was problematic. Said Ivens:
"I remarked that it would be cheaper and more satisfactory in
every respect to make a documentary film on the spot." And so
he did, financed to the tune of $18,000 by writers Archibald
Macleish, Lillian Hellman, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker
and others.

The resulting film, The Spanish Earth (1937), is a
double documentary, depicting up close and personal the war's
death and destruction, and the Spanish people's efforts to
turn seized lands into communities, but also epitomizing the
openly engaged convictions of the American left with the
immediacy and urgency of a front-line dispatch from a war
zone when the documentary form had begun flexing its muscles
and finding out what it could do. Ivens had the good sense to
let the film evolve as conditions demanded, abandoning large
portions of an original scenario by himself, Macleish, Dos
Passos and Hellman featuring re-enactments, dramatized
narration and semi-fictional characterizations. Thematically,
the finished film shows peasant soldiers against a
counterpoint of civilians collectively growing food on their
newly acquired lands confiscated from feudal landlords in the
village of Fuenteduena to feed the men on the front
lines.

The original idea of presenting the film as the acted-out
political education of a village soon gave way to stronger
and far more compelling material. Ivens reunited with his
European cameraman, John Ferno, to shoot the Spanish footage,
which he kept sending back to New York to be edited by his
longtime Dutch colleague, Helen van Dongen. Enter Ernest
Hemingway - in several important capacities. Veteran war
correspondent Hemingway knew battle conditions, and soon
found himself advising Ferno where to place the cameras for
minimum risk. He also carried equipment around and wrote the
narrative commentary. After Orson Welles, originally
designated to speak it, was deemed too theatrical-sounding,
Hemingway spoke it as well (TCM is airing the version narrated by Orson Welles).

The words, and the way Hemingway speaks them, add fullness
and dimension to The Spanish Earth. His flat,
sometimes raw intoning of his own words gives them an urgency
a slicker-sounding narrator would have undermined. "This
Spanish Earth is dry and hard," are the first words we hear
him speak. This is Hemingway before he became Hemingway the
litterateur, before his clipped style became imitated into
parody. Each word seems a polished stone, a piece of the
human condition taken to an irreducible minimum. And it is
Hemingway who sums up in a sentence the reason Ivens had to
scrap his original filming blueprint and give himself and the
film over to the very thing that makes it the powerful human
experience it is: "Men cannot act in front of the camera in
the presence of death."

Those words, spoken with conviction, are the key to the
film's enduring power. Many a documentary maker has been
tripped up by asking people to portray themselves for the
camera. Many times, the minute they do, they lose their
authenticity. Not here. As often as the film shows us
soldiers stumbling into battle in squads of six - then, as
Hemingway reminds us, five, then four, then three - we see
them in small human moments, reading newspapers off-duty,
getting haircuts, taking a cigarette break. Not for The
Spanish Earth the overwhelming robotic symmetries of rank
after rank of Nazi troops in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of
the Will (1935), the polar opposite in agitprop of The
Spanish Earth, with its dehumanized masses right out of
Metropolis (1927). These Spanish soldiers always seem
local boys temporarily uprooted from their homes, but
essentially individual village lads joined in a cause,
fighting against heavy odds.

Both sides had foreign help. We see German bombers and
artillery in action. We see respectfully photographed corpses
of Italian Fascist troops sent to aid the fascist rebels. We
see no signs of the Soviet Union's support of the Loyalists
(or the sidestepping by France, Britain and the U.S. of what
proved to be a dress rehearsal for World War II). Only four
brief scenes remain of Ivens' original plan to tell the story
through a farm boy, Julien, gone off to war, then returning
home to eventually train new recruits. Even the legendarily
fiery Communist spokeswoman, La Passionaria, somehow seems
more powerful and less canned, not in the newsreel shots of
her, with clenched, upraised fist, addressing a crowd, but in
her words being blared through a primitive loudspeaker in a
field. The idea and images of the land remain the yin to the
film's combat yang. The film ends on a note of double triumph
- workers put in place the last of a set of hollowed-out logs
acting as a conduit for water to irrigate a hitherto parched
field in Fuenteduena, and a single Republican rifleman fires
the last shot in a successful Loyalist defense of a bridge
over the Tagus River, on the Valencia-Madrid Road running
through the village.

Like most important films, most films that stay with you,
The Spanish Earth is carried by its faces, whether of
a village baker (it makes no difference that he looks
smilingly into the camera) beaming over loaves of freshly
baked bread with union imprints perforating their crusts, or
a panicked mother bolting down a street trying to make it to
a bomb shelter during the shelling of Madrid. The rawness of
the footage - some is even unfocused and blurry - adds to the
film's power. The deaths we see in the streets of Madrid - a
couple of schoolboys, a corpse in suit and tie being tossed
into a wagon collecting the dead bomb victims - are the real
thing. How could you stage anything as impactful? Only
occasionally are Ivens' lapses into estheticism felt. A
religious statue photographed against the sky through a
tangle of barbed wire. Farm workers grouped in a ploughed
field as Ivens' compatriot, Vincent Van Gogh, might have
grouped them during his own time spent in the Borinage. These
look authentic, but in a composed way, somewhat at odds with
the esthetic of the rest of the film.

Ever since Robert Flaherty staged scenes of Inuit life in
Nanook of the North (1922), debate has raged about
without resolution about what a documentary is and should be.
At the time, Macleish and the film's other left-leaning
backers fired back at critics of the film's lack of
objectivity by saying that any such objectivity would be
spurious, and that committed filmmaking not only is a
defensible goal, but is more urgent, more deeply human.
Later, cinema verite's filmmakers took heated issue with this
stance. Yet repeatedly the realism in the detailing of The
Spanish Earth presages cinema verite, right from its
start with long shots of fields against picturesque hills
against which sounds of shelling and plumes of smoke in the
distance seem incongruous. Where you may stand on the
cultural and esthetic assumptions behind The Spanish
Earth is arguable. But of its you-are-there immediacy and
the heroics involved in capturing it there can be no doubt.
Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., founded in 1949 by James
Card and one of America's four major archives with The
Library of Congress, The Museum of Modern Art and the UCLA
Film Archives, contains few more important artifacts among
the 25,000-plus titles under its roof.

Sources:
Dictionary of Films, by Georges Sadoul, translated by Peter
Morris, University of California Press, 1972
International Directory of Films and Filmmakers - 1: Films,
Second Edition, edited by Nicholas Thomas, St. James Press,
1990
International Directory of Films and Filmmakers - 2:
Directors, Second Edition, edited by Nicholas Thomas, St.
James Press, 1994
Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to
1942, by William Alexander, Princeton University Press,
1982
The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson, edited by Robert Wilson,
Temple University Press, 1971
Articles on This Spanish Earth, by Thomas Waugh,
Cineaste, Vol. XII, Nos. 2 and 3, 1982
"Show Us Life" - Toward a History and Aesthetics of the
Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, Scarecrow
Press, 1984
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